Takahashi's Scheduler Case Book: Chapter 8

The Speedy Case of the Electronics Corporation

I visited Company H, a large Japanese electronics corporations that has a major share in the Japanese market. They had already installed ten production schedulers and those schedulers were making a major impact on their manufacturing. The reason that I was making this visit was because I had received a report saying that the schedulers we had delivered needed debugging. The bugs consisted of inaccuracies in remote area situations resulting in imprecision and I was there to investigate the problems being caused. I was able to find out what the bug was almost immediately and got it fixed.

Looking at the data, I could see that more than 4,000 resources were registered, the largest number I had ever seen. About 3,000 of these were for tool and die. The reason that so many tool and die plants were registered was because there was a tool and die for each product type. As far as tool and die products are concerned there is more than one type. There are major restrictions on the preparation of a production schedule such as how the tools and dies are going to be used, we have to register all these different types in the production scheduler in order to schedule production. The main machines have fully adequate flexibility which is so that they can handle customer orders for very quick delivery time.

As soon as an order comes in, the production scheduler immediately starts scheduling going backwards from the delivery date and time, it checks the date of arrival and the available raw materials, and then sets the production schedule in place. That is how a just-in-time production schedule is made. Express orders are placed forward in the production schedule and we know when production will be complete from when production begins. Then we give an answer back to the customer on delivery time. That creates a production schedule with the shortest lead time.

We know precisely whether order with the most recent delivery time will be on time. We also know at what time we should begin making the orders that have later delivery times and when to have the raw materials for them ready. Managing a production schedule that entails 4,000 sets of raw materials by manual production scheduling would be impossible.

I was able to see that one of the reasons this corporation is a leading force worldwide is accurate management of fast on-time deliveries through the use of production scheduling.